Isn't natural gas much easier to pump than oil? It's a gas, so isn't all that's involved is piercing the field and letting it flow? Doesn't that mean that it's a lot easier to pump natural gas and, thus, deplete the field than oil?

Obviously, I know very little any basic primer on the Natural gas pumping mechanics would be great

Russ wrote:Isn't natural gas much easier to pump than oil? It's a gas, so isn't all that's involved is piercing the field and letting it flow? Doesn't that mean that it's a lot easier to pump natural gas and, thus, deplete the field than oil?

Obviously, I know very little any basic primer on the Natural gas pumping mechanics would be great

Viscosity differences between gas and oil is huge, and all in natural gases favor. Natural gas isn't "pumped", give it a 2psi pressure differential and it'll just move right along.

From that prespective, yes, it does make a gas field easier to deplete than an oil field, plus there aren't quite the "changing recovery factor" arguements which make for lively and interesting reserve changes.

Russ wrote:So how quickly do reserves deplete? Or, how long does North America have?

Gas reserves suffer from the same reporting problems that oil reserves do, so all the usual debates can take place. Plus, its easier to produce small gas wells than small oil wells, both from an operational standpoint and an economic one, and small wells is what all wells become at some point in time or another.

My guess is once a big LNG terminal opens near a decent sized hub, north american natural gas problems just translate to world natural gas problems, same as oil, post early 70's. So maybe the question is when does the world run out, and how high will the price have to be to sustain LNG operations world wide.

In an act of extraordinary courage, a top Petrohawk executive threatened to cancel his free subscription to World Oil if the magazine continued to publish my column. Today, John Royall, President and CEO for Gulf Publishing, cancelled my November column.

I have accordingly resigned as contributing editor.

Heading Out (Dave Summers) and I have been talking about the issues Arthur Berman raises for quite a while now. Most recently, Dave wrote a post called Shale Gas Estimates Perhaps Optimistic - An Interesting and Worrying Talk at ASPO.

So what are the issues involved?

What Arthur Berman is saying is that natural gas companies that extract shale are mis-estimating how quickly natural gas production will decline in the future--they are assuming gas production will decline more slowly than evidence indicates it will. As a result of their optimistic assumptions about decline rates, they are assuming that shale gas can profitably be extracted for as long as 50 years, when Berman believes the average well life is only about 8 years.

What Arthur Berman is saying is that natural gas companies that extract shale are mis-estimating how quickly natural gas production will decline in the future--they are assuming gas production will decline more slowly than evidence indicates it will. As a result of their optimistic assumptions about decline rates, they are assuming that shale gas can profitably be extracted for as long as 50 years, when Berman believes the average well life is only about 8 years.